Being (Imaginatively) on the Great British Baking Show

          Making a black-bottom banana cream pie for lunch with friends, I plunged head-first into imaginary participation in the Great British Baking Show.

            I was making a vanilla custard for the cream layer because that's what my recipe called for, but now I could hear Mary, one of the two judges on the show, saying to one of my imaginary fellow contestants, "Andy, tell us what you're doing for your banana cream pie," and he says, "I'm using a brandy and coffee custard over a maple-infused chocolate ganache." Another contestant says she is making a passion fruit and pineapple custard to continue the tropical theme suggested by the banana. I began to think my vanilla custard unimaginative. When Mary and Paul, the other judge, ask me about my pie, Paul says, "I love the banana flavor. Are you sure it'll compete well with the strong chocolate ganache of your filling?" challenging my judgement with steel-blue eyes.

            "It worked at home," I say, lamely, just like the bakers on the show, and he says, "Good luck."

             "What we're looking for," I heard Paul say as I crushed chocolate wafers with the rolling pin for my crust, "is a delicate crust, perfectly baked, without a hint of sogginess, and a cream filling of flavors that perfectly complement the bananas. Everything beautifully decorated."

            My crust, I thought, pressing its top evenly around the pie plate, looked good, and my bananas were at perfect ripeness, but I worried as I poured the custard over the banana-filled chocolate-black crust. "The custard is overcooked," I heard Paul say with his straightforward, pull-no-punches judgement.

            But then Mary steps in with her usual tact. "The taste is fantastic," she says, smiling at me apologetically. "But I'm afraid the custard is a bit overcooked."

            I looked briefly at the imaginary TV camera as I dribbled chocolate ganache lines over the custard and said, worriedly, "I think I got the ganache too thick. It's not flowing off the spoon very easily." I drew a toothpick through the lines of ganache, creating a marbleized pattern. Looking at it critically, I saw that the spacing between rows wasn't even. I had seen Great British Baking Show contestants covering mistakes (cracks in the cake, unevenly baked eclairs), so I laid a row of bananas in the too-big spaces between rows of ganache, turning the mistake into a design element.

            My ride to the luncheon would be here in twenty minutes. "Twenty minutes, bakers," I heard the show's host, Sue Perkins, calling. "You have twenty minutes before Paul and Mary go bananas." Like the TV bakers, I felt the tension.

            I filled my pastry bag with whipped cream and tried one cake-decorating tip after another, hearing Mary say, gently, to a contestant on one of the shows, "We asked for rosettes, and we got shells." I piped rosettes around the edge of my pie. Paul: "The rosettes are not perfect. Some are bigger than others," so I squeezed more whipped cream on top of too-small rosettes.

            The luncheon was a meeting of six friends who get together monthly to read poetry. This time we read and discussed Marge Piercy's poetry, then had lunch (homemade pizza and salad). Then we read some more of Piercy's poems. Then we went back to the table for dessert.

            "How beautiful!" my own judges (pie eaters) exclaimed as I carried the pie in. 

They admired its black marbled design and white rosette border on the cream-yellow, banana-slice-decorated filling.

            On the Great British Baking Show, contestants always look worried as Paul and Mary cut into their creations. Will it have turned out right? I had the same qualms. I sliced the pie – so far so good – but had a hard time working my spatula under the crust. I worried it had burned, but it hadn't. The custard, not being undercooked, stayed in place when I transferred a piece of pie to a plate. The pie looked as good on the plate as it did in the pie pan. ("Nice layers," Paul and Mary whispered in my ear.)

            "This is delicious," my judges said, biting into their pie.

            "Star baker!" someone pronounced.

            I'm not sure Paul and Mary would have agreed, but I also don't think I would have been told not to return. On the contrary, I was asked to bring dessert next month. "In fact," my friends and baking show judges said, "you can always bring the desserts."

            As far as I'm concerned, that's as good as star baker.

Gingerbread House

            One of the things I wanted to do with my granddaughter while she was here after Christmas was make a gingerbread house. In anticipation I baked the gingerbread and cut it into rectangles. I bought candies for decoration and made sure I had enough powdered sugar for icing. Then I waited for an opportunity to make the house.

            The morning of the day my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter would be leaving, my son, Ela, said, "Now, what about that gingerbread house?"

            I had thought it wasn't going to happen, but now we flung ourselves into construction. I found a piece of cardboard for the base, then brought out the rectangles cut for the walls and roof. I whipped up some royal icing to serve as mortar. Ela cut out the door and gave it to my granddaughter, Kairos, to decorate, then started raising the walls. I slathered icing on the edges of the walls as he held them in place until the icing hardened and the basic construction of the house was done. The next step was the roof.

            That's when we realized our mistake. The walls had been cut the right size, but we were supposed to have put the front and back on the inside of the side walls. We had done the opposite. Now the roof wouldn't fit. We tried forcing the walls inward, but that was obviously going to break the house. I suggested string, thinking vaguely about tying it through the windows. Picking up on the string idea, using toothpicks pressed gently into the tops of the walls straight down into the gingerbread, Ela created "nails" to tie the string onto. Pulling gently, he was able to bring the walls closer together until the roof fit. The string was enclosed inside, icing covered the gaps, and the house was saved!

          Kairos decorated the front with multi-colored sprinkles, licorice, red-hots, a peppermint under the peak of the roof, and a Swedish fish over the front door.

 Ela made a house occupant from gingerbread, with a gumdrop hat, to stand next to the door. His mini-marshmallow snowman kept drooping, so we propped it up with toothpick arms. I decorated a side wall while my daughter-in-law worked in the back, putting a mandala on the wall and flowers along the base, so even though it's winter in the front yard, all you have to do is walk around to the back to be in spring already. 

Gummy bears cavort along the sides, some of them upside down, doing headstands. Kairos and I did the roof, shingling banana chips and placing gumdrops at the top when we ran out of banana chips. There is, of course, a chimney. The finishing touch was the peppermint fence my granddaughter made.   

            We took some hurried pictures and hugged good-bye, and they left in a flurry. I cleaned the kitchen and took down the Christmas tree, but I left the gingerbread house, the cutest gingerbread house ever made, on the dining room table. Pretty soon I'll take it down. 

             Or maybe not. Maybe I'll freeze it, as someone suggested, and bring it out next Christmas.

            Or maybe, as cute as the finished product is, the real value was not in the house itself but in the building of it, something which, like all good times, was a moment, a fleeting moment, the kind of things about which John Ashberry said,

            For although memories, of a season, for example,

            Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure

            That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;

           It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,

            Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,

            Harsh strokes.

Don't Call Me "Miss"

"Thank you, miss."

"Can I help you, miss?"

"Have a good day, miss."

       Miss? I am 73 years old, and even though those men, those cashiers and salespeople, have no way of knowing my age, there is also no way they could mistake me for a young woman. 

       To be accurate, "Miss" really means an unmarried woman, but because when the word evolved, all unmarried women were supposed to be young (all young women were supposed to get married), the word implies, by obviousness, a young woman. If a woman was no longer young and still unmarried, she was still called “Miss,” in this case implying that the woman who grew old was still a virgin, the “old” “maid.” Miss Habersham, left at the altar on her wedding day and still dressed, after all those decades, in her wedding dress, now ruined with age, is, correctly “Miss” Habersham. Although I am in my seventies and unmarried, I am not a virgin, and I reject the Miss Habersham connotation of being called “Miss.” 

        I don't like being called "ma'am," either, but without linguistic justification for that prejudice. It's probably a rejection of my southern upbringing, when "ma'am" was a respectful title for one's female elders, the problem residing in that last word.

       Title designation was also difficult while I was teaching. I was neither "Mrs. Coogle” (married) nor "Miss Coogle” (virgin). I suggested students call me “Ms. Coogle,” using that marriage-neutral and age-neutral term, in parallel with "Mr." But some students felt awkward using it, by which I understood that it's a dated term, which is too bad because it fulfills a necessary linguistic vacuum. I said that “Diana” was all right, but such informality made some students uncomfortable. The problem was solved after I got my Ph.D., when I was, simply, accurately, and genderlessly, Dr. Coogle.

       I think that when the grocer calls me "Miss," he thinks he's flattering me: "I'll ignore the fact that you're an older (not exactly old) woman and call you by the title of a younger woman," thereby emphasizing the fact that I am not a young woman, so it comes out as a mild insult rather than a mild compliment. 

       Of course, this is petty stuff, miles from the legitimate and serious complaints from women about their treatment from men in the workplace. It isn't sexism but ageism that is the problem here. Using “young feller” with older men, as in "Can I help you, young feller?" makes the same age-related point as calling me "Miss." 

      This way of using a phrase that indicates its opposite is an unconscious use of a literary technique that Anglo-Saxon poets were fond of using deliberately, telling us how a thing was by saying how it was not. When the warriors at the Battle of Maldon encouraged their fellow fighters, they said not, “Warriors, be brave!” but “Warriors, don’t be cowards!” When the Phoenix poet described Paradise, he called it not a place of joy but a place of no lamentation. 

       Likewise today, when a man means, in his subconscious language, "You're old but doing pretty well," he says, "Have a good day, miss."

New Year's Eve 2017

            Maybe 2017 was full of downers, politically. Maybe it had its ups and downs for me, personally. Maybe it had tearful days and disappointments among happy days and triumphs, but whatever else I can say about it, I can definitely say that it ended with a great day.

            I had suggested to Mike that he and I hike up Kerby Peak on the last day of the year, since there would be no snow (not in this lousy winter!) and the rattlesnakes that abound there would be asleep in their dens. My son, visiting for the holidays from Washington, said he would like to join us, so early on the morning of January 31 the three of us set off on the trail.

            Mike and I hike together a lot. We know each other's rhythms and habits. I usually hike in front. I hike less often with Ela. He was in the lead on the New Year's Eve hike. I could tell that he was holding back, containing his energy and his strength so we could all hike together. I was reminded of hiking the Horse Camp trail with him, years ago, when he was twenty and I was forty-seven. I was working hard to climb that steepest trail in the Applegate. Ela hiked ahead of me, so much at his leisure that he was talking, walking backwards, juggling pine cones. Now he is the age I was then, and I'm still twenty-seven years older, and the walking ratio has remained as constant as the age ratio. About a mile before the top, Ela let go of companionable hiking and strode on his long, strong legs to the top of the mountain, where he waited for Mike and me to catch up. I wondered if, were today's Ela to hike with the Ela of his younger years, his two-decade-different selves would have the difficulty-to-age ratio of his and mine. Or if, were my forty-seven-year-old self to hike with me now, it would be waiting for me on top of the mountain, as Ela was.

           The Kerby Peak trail is one of the steepest trails along the Highway 199 corridor, with an elevation gain of 2600 feet in the six and a half miles it takes to get to the top (at 5,545 feet). We hiked through beautiful Douglas fir forests, rock outcroppings (where the rattlesnakes, abundant on Kerby Peak, were sleeping!), low-lying manzanita, and some of the best stands of Brewers spruce I know of in the Siskiyous.

            The top of Kerby Peak rewards the hiker with a spectacular 360-degree view. On January 31, 2017, the peak poked above dense white fog, lying thick and unmoving over the circular landscape below us. 

Rounded green peaks humped here and there above the fog-sea. Snow-streaked mountains of the Siskiyou Wilderness rose in the distance. A strong cold wind pushed all around us. We ate lunch

 and admired the view 

until we were ready to escape the wind and head down the trail again.

            After the hike we stopped for coffee at my favorite coffee shop in Grants Pass. Then we all went back to my house for a good New Year's Eve dinner: chili, sauteed portobellos, chocolate eclairs, and champagne. We weren't sure we wanted to stay awake till midnight, but we played a game of Scrabble after dinner, then another. Then it was close enough to the new year that we entertained each other with more games of wit and words until finally it was midnight. We rang in the new year, Ela did a video chat with his daughter, and we went to bed.

            I stretched my well worked body horizontal in my bed and drowsed into sleep without thinking about the goods and the bads of the past year. I didn't need to. It felt at the moment that it had been a good year indeed and that the new year, with such a good start, would be a good one, too.